A light meter is a great purchase and will certainly help with this type of portrait work.

My word of advice however when using a light meter is to not let it tell you what aperture to use, rather it should be the other way around. You're the photographer remember. Decide on your settings, aperture, shutter speed, iso and adjust your flash output until your light meter tells you the flash is satisfying your settings, not the other way round.

Thanks ct8282
I understand what you're saying. I do pick shutter speed and ISO. I could have just adjusted the flash power or moved the light back for a different aperture. This was just a quick test shot mainly to try the background color out.

I can't help but thinking that if I was taking your portrait, I'd have the camera quite a bit higher than it currently is. This is not a particularly flattering angle for you. In addition, the further you can get you from the backdrop, the better off you're going to be. And rather than use f/16, try and find a power setting on your flash (or a lower ISO setting on your camera) that lets you use f/5.6 or so. That will help not have backdrop wrinkles in focus.

At the same time you try raising the camera, try raising the light as well. You've been making good progress. Keep it going.

Poke, I do like the the new steps - you look more relaxed. I like the lighting better. I agree, the camera angle is a bit low in this case. Choose your aperture so your background will be blurred (open it up). The background in the second shot looks smooth - I am just not sure what the color splash is about ... it does not really tie in with anything else.

Thanks for all your help/patience everyone!
In this pic I raised the umbrella as high as possible and I'm sitting on a stool.My cheap piece of @#$% tripod only goes to five feet.
I also feel I did a pretty decent job lighting the background. And I adjusted the flash so that I could use F4.
Not sure I like what auto levels does in CS6 but other then that...

Much better with red shirt version. Now crop off the top portion of the background and you're golden. Or mask it or clone since you mentioned cs 6. Sorry I can't direct cropping better...I'm surfing on tablet so a bit tough to tell for sure but could likely constrain proportions (on crop tool) and just loose a bit on sides and still chop top down enough.

Thanks hk_mtbr and also novicesnapper!!!.
The red shirt was shot in my newly improvised studio (the gym in a spare bedroom)
Anyway I finally feel like I have a setup that I can easily duplicate for future work.

One of my neighbors has already expressed interest in having me take pics of them and their new baby. I think I'm ready for that thanks to everyone's advice here on FM.